Lessons From Analyzing 1,000 Agency Blogs Ep. 017

Kyle RackiApril 06, 2017 | 27:12

This week on the Proposify Biz Chat, I interview Simon Thompson, founder of Content Kite, a company that helps digital agencies increase their leads through content marketing. Simon has held content marketing roles for some of the largest digital publishers in Australia such as Microsoft, Daily Mail, and MTV. He’s worked on content projects for major global brands such as L'Oreal, Nissan, BMW, Adidas, Disney, and Mondelez, to name a few.

Listen on:

What it’s about

As founder of Content Kite, Simon Thompson is naturally very interested in the power of content to help businesses grow. He kept hearing that agencies were traditionally not very good at creating content for themselves, instead relying on referrals for 90% of their sales leads. But this was all anecdotal information, so Simon wanted to see what the data had to say.

Simon and his Content Kite team analyzed the websites of 1000 digital agencies. They categorized each site as:

No blog

Had a blog and posted once a quarter (None)

Had a blog and posted 1-3 times /quarter (Poor)

Had a blog and posted 1-3 times/month/ (Mediocre)

Had a blog and posted once a week or more. (Great)

Once a week or more would be what Simon would consider an optimal agency blog.

The alarming stats from this showed that only 7% of agencies posted once a week, while 36% of the agencies sampled were only posting a few times a year. And 30% of agencies had no blog at all, deciding for one reason or another it’s just not for them.

Simon believes that good content marketing can help agencies bridge the ‘feast or famine’ gap that many suffer from, bringing in quality, sustainable leads. In this interview, he shares his tips for how agencies can get serious ROI from their blogs.

Takeaways:

1. Get a content strategy in place

Simon finds that many people get scared off by the term ‘content strategy’, but the team at Content Kite approaches it with a simple framework called ‘Hub and Spoke’. They suggest their agency clients come up with a central idea or topic that helps a specific person solve a specific problem. For example, Content Kite’s specific person (AKA target audience) is a digital agency owner, and their specific problem is getting more leads. So all the content they create reflects that - its purpose is to help a digital agency owner get more leads.

2. Upgrade your content to a lead magnet

A lead magnet is an extra piece of content that you offer in exchange for an email address, an ebook, or white paper. They help build your email list so you can create relationships that may turn into leads. When people visit your blog, you know that they’re interested in that single topic. When you create a lead magnet that is specific to that piece of content, then you significantly increase the chances that the reader is going to sign up to your email list to receive more about that particular topic. It might be a checklist, a cheat sheet, or even a pdf version of that article. Blogs that offer lead magnets see an email sign-up increase anywhere from 50-1000% compared to those that don't.

3. Reach out to other bloggers

People think if they create really great content it’s naturally going to get shared. That may be somewhat true - good content does eventually get shared but to kickstart that process Simon recommends reaching out to other bloggers. When you write a piece of content, do a search for similar articles that have been written on that topic and make a list of the authors. Then email them: “Hey, I notice you wrote an article about X. I wrote a similar article/opposing view. Here’s the link, have a read, and please let me know what you think.” Hopefully, they’ll share your post.

To increase the chances, reach out to that author and ask for additional insight, or a quote you can insert in the article and link back to them. It’s good ‘ego-bait’ - it helps their SEO, and they’re likely to share the article because they appear as an ‘expert’.

4. Share multiple times

For a quick content win that can double your traffic, share across your social platforms multiple times:

Facebook: once on publish and once a month later;

Twitter: once on publish, then two hours later, the next day, the next week, the next month and again a month after that;

Google Plus: once on publish, once the next week, and then the next month.

Say Hello toSimon Thompson

About the show

The Proposify Biz Chat is hosted by Kyle Racki, co-founder and CEO of Proposify proposal software. Each week,
Kyle chats with friends and special guests about tips and strategies to help entrepreneurs, startups, and
agencies grow profitable businesses.